A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  This turned out to be none other than the young wife of a composer whose latest show was scheduled for the Gaiety. Picking up on Pattie’s enthusiasm, she encouraged her to come along for an audition, which Pattie managed to do in secret, only releasing the news when her excitement at being offered a trial could not be contained.

  Her mother cried and her brothers forbade, of course, but Pattie displayed considerable mettle, withstanding them all and pointing out that Gaiety Girls were famously ladylike and stood a much better chance of marrying to advantage than young women immured in villas in Twickenham. She stormed every bit as fiercely as Robert – nobody had suspected before that she had such a temper – and ended by simply going her own way.

  Rehearsals happened during the day, while Frank and Robert were off at work, and Winnie acted as chaperone, at least at first, accompanying her to the theatre, meeting and being thoroughly won over by her colleagues. Indeed, some expert emergency assistance she lent to the leading lady’s wardrobe led to her receiving a flurry of dressmaking commissions, including one from the chorus’s acknowledged star, Gladys Cooper.

  Winnie and Harry had been obliged to move to Ma Touraine in the end. They had taken the little flat over the stable block, where they were really very cosy. Though nominally independent, they ate most of their meals with the others. Of all the economies he had made in the process of leaving Herne Bay, it was the loss of daily riding that Harry felt especially deeply. When entering a cab, or sometimes when simply crossing a busy street, he would catch the patient eye of a waiting groom or smell the familiar scents of sweat, leather and hay-sweet dung and be unsettled by a violent yearning.

  He found that he liked, however, the novelty of life en famille. While Winnie busied herself with her dressmaking, he would spend time with Mrs Wells, simply chatting, playing cards with her friends or wheeling Phyllis around the garden in her pram. Winnie had never liked his spending too much time with the child. Often he would be firmly told that Nurse had taken Phyllis out, or that she was sleeping or on the point of being fed. Babies needed routines, he was told, in which his presence would constitute a damaging interference. But the move back to Strawberry Hill had in some way demoted Winnie from wife to daughter, and she seemed happy to relinquish the care of the child to others.

  Mrs Wells seemed amused at the novelty of a father showing an interest in an infant, and sometimes encouraged him to walk ahead, pushing the pram around the adjoining riverside park, so that she could follow a few yards to the rear and enjoy the expressions of surprise or curiosity on the faces of the people strolling there.

  Now that he was their brother-in-law, the youngest girls, Julie, Kitty and May, were no longer hidden from him in the nursery but would co-opt him into games and play-readings and even their lessons. Madame Vance had, perforce, been let go as part of the economies Mrs Wells was obliged to embrace. It amused Harry, and made him feel a little wise and useful, to quiz them on their geography and French. He even attempted to teach them some elementary Latin.

  They certainly had no good example from Pattie, who had barely begun rehearsals at the Gaiety (where she soon persuaded Winnie that a chaperone was quite unnecessary, and even mortifying) when she started disappearing for mysterious weekends away. One of her friends, who was engaged to an American financier, had a cottage, or had been set up in a cottage, as Winnie said darkly, near Pangbourne, where the fiancé threw parties. Here, Pattie acquired an aristocratic admirer. He was a third son, rather cruelly nicknamed Notty, which was short for Not Quite, as in not quite an earl.

  Beside herself with excitement, Mrs Wells had looked up his family in Burke’s Peerage. They were known to be immensely wealthy, owning coal mines and a steelworks as well as large tracts of central London. Third son or no, Notty was a catch. And yet the manner of his knowing Pattie was irregular, having been overseen by neither Pattie’s mother nor his. Having encountered her first as an actress rather than as somebody’s precious daughter, he had inevitably engendered a fear – barely voiced in Ma Touraine – that his intentions were less than honourable.

  This had been exacerbated when Pattie swanned home wearing a dazzlingly pretty French gold pocket watch he had given her. She was told she must return it at once, since they were not engaged, but in the course of the furious row she revealed that she couldn’t possibly, as poor Notty would be too hurt since it had been his grandmother’s. Mistresses, or mistresses-by-intent, were not as a rule given family jewels, so this in turn had cranked up Mrs Wells’s anticipation, as had her receiving a letter from the generous gentleman, inviting her and her family to join him in his box for the opening performance of the new show, and afterwards for supper.

  Even when teased, Pattie would reveal nothing about Notty other than that he was sweet, which had led Winnie to guess they should expect someone a little like the King. ‘Considerably older, rounder and with a beard,’ she suggested. The image, offered in bed, had taken root, so it had been a shock to arrive at the box to be welcomed by a diffident, sandy-haired young man who was indeed neatly bearded but not much older than Harry. Far from resembling some worldly seducer, he gave off an air of candid innocence and enthusiasm that had Harry thinking him not terribly bright and that perhaps it was he who needed protection from Miss Pattie and not the other way around.

  As the ladies of the chorus finished their song and dance, Notty was far louder in his applause than Pattie’s kith and kin, and shouted out, ‘Splendid! Splendid!’ so enthusiastically that Harry felt Winnie shrink back in her chair.

  Pattie made more appearances, each time in a new costume. Her contribution was neither notable nor risible. That unnerving magnetism she could display in a drawing room, however, was quite lost upon a cavernous stage and amidst practised competitors. The more verbally supportive her Notty became, the surer it seemed that there was no risk of her ever stepping out of the chorus to become a celebrated promoter of cold cream or toilet water.

  Perhaps this was the reason the members of this particular chorus were noted for their advantageous marriages: for all their beauty, their theatrical skills were not alarmingly professional. As Mrs Wells received compliments and a further glass of champagne in the first interval, and flattered their host by pretending she needed his help to understand the wafer-thin plot, there was in her manner an unmistakable air of relief. Had Pattie stepped forward to the footlights to dance a spectacular solo or comedy turn, had she been called upon, as another girl was, to swing on a garlanded trapeze over the orchestra while the chorus pelted her with silk peonies, her chances of passing from this eccentric adventure to something more respectable would have been drastically diminished.

  The Honourable Notty had booked a large private dining room above a nearby restaurant and had encouraged Pattie to bring along several of her new friends from the company. This was a relief, as their host’s enthusiasm sat awkwardly with Robert’s haughtiness (which, Harry had noted, grew far worse when he was made to feel middle class) and Frank’s inability to varnish the truth. Indeed, Frank had just announced that true talent was one thing, he supposed, but his sister was cheapening herself and the family to no discernible purpose, when the party of performers arrived and everyone else burst into nervous laughter and applause.

  Harry embraced Pattie – who was wearing Notty’s watch, he noted – and she presented him to Gladys Cooper, who dropped him a laughing curtsey to show off the gown Winnie had made her, which was enjoying its first outing. Then there was a little flurry of awkwardness.

  The usual questions of precedence were hardly going to arise in a restaurant, and at a round table. They were to sit where they liked, Notty announced unhelpfully – though he naturally would have Mrs Wells on his right and Pattie on his left – so long as no men sat drearily beside their wives. In her exuberance, and evidently at ease with her admirer’s largesse, Pattie had swept up with her more members of the company than could fit round the table. Harry e
nsured that Winnie had a seat between her brothers, then found himself at a secondary table the staff had hastily swathed in white linen.

  He shook the hand of Cora Lane, an actress of a certain age who had sung a comedy song. She looked like minor royalty but turned out to speak a form of Cockney thinly larded with arch touches of elegance she had surely acquired from play scripts. She declared herself charmed, made him a funny little bow when he said, quite truthfully, how amusing he had found her song, and introduced him to the others at the table over which she had effortlessly assumed rule.

  There was one other woman – a young, feathered wisp of a thing so shy and wordless it was hard to credit she had ever found the courage to pass through a stage door, much less attend an audition. She was introduced simply as Vera, as though the name told one all one need know, then not addressed again all evening.

  ‘And these are Messrs Pryde, Hawkey and Gosling, whose footwork I’m sure you admired every bit as much as my little ditty.’

  ‘Gentlemen.’

  Harry was unsurprised to find the dancers’ handshakes repellently limp. They were of a type he recognised from walks along the Strand or from his visits to the Jermyn Street baths: slim-hipped, ostentatiously flexible creatures who inexplicably chose to ape girls rather than exploit as men the advantages fate had awarded them. One assumed they had parents and siblings somewhere, in some rarely visited country village possibly, but they gave every impression of having emerged, fully formed, from eggs, as brittle as the waxy shells they had discarded.

  ‘And this is Mr Browning.’

  Mr Browning had not come clucking and pecking from an egg; his handshake made Harry wonder whether his own had been sufficiently firm. He was taller than Harry, black-haired and serious.

  They sat, Harry finding himself between solemn Mr Browning and Mr Pryde. Mr Pryde insisted on clinking champagne flutes with Harry, simpering, ‘Cheers, m’dear,’ then immediately turned aside to pay court not to the resolutely silent Vera, who was on his other side, but to the empress of their little table, who had launched on some anecdote.

  ‘You’re stuck with me,’ Mr Browning said, and allowed himself a small, self-deprecating smile, which emphasised the interesting cleft in his chin.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Harry told him. He said it, as he often said things when shy, without thinking. Then he worried that the rejoinder sounded wrong, or misleading, so added, ‘You’re rather a relief.’ Something in the close way Mr Browning’s deep-set eyes, with their lingering traces of stage make-up, were watching him caused him to stammer on relief.

  It was one of his rare bad stammers, which seemed impossibly long and loud. Mr Pryde turned to look at him with passing curiosity and he fancied Cora Lane momentarily paused in her performance to frown at the interruption.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he managed at last. ‘You’re rather a relief,’ he repeated, to show he could. ‘It only happens when I’m frightened.’

  ‘Well I’m not remotely frightening,’ Mr Browning said. ‘I’m only an actor. Those two on either side of your pretty wife, with the beards, now they’d make any man stutter.’

  Harry glanced at Winnie, who noticed and narrowed her eyes slightly, privately amused as Robert held forth about something that seemed to involve salt, pepper and both his forks. ‘My brothers-in-law,’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Browning said but did not apologise. ‘I could probably help you, if you came to me. I do a little voice instruction on the side, when not pursuing my glorious career.’

  ‘Oh,’ Harry began, then remembered to fill his lungs before he started. ‘I’m not sure I could—’

  ‘I wouldn’t charge.’ Again that discreet, interested little smile.

  Food arrived, and because their table was an afterthought and was rather crushed into a corner, they had to shift slightly in their seats to allow the waiters to serve them. In shifting, Mr Browning ended up sitting with his knee against Harry’s within the damask tent of tablecloth. Because he was drunk on Notty’s excellent champagne, Harry took a moment or two to register the warm pressure of another man’s leg against his own and a moment or two more to remember that the appropriate response, as practised in crowded railway carriages and omnibuses across the capital, was to say nothing that might embarrass the other party but simply to move his leg aside.

  Mr Browning looked at him directly as Harry lifted a forkful of crabmeat to his mouth, smiled and, still looking at him, pressed his knee into his again. ‘You have nothing to fear,’ he said. He scarcely needed to lower his voice because the others were now making so much noise.

  The waiters had not long before filled their glasses, but Harry felt as though he had just drained his in a single, head-spinning draught. A rush of warmth mounted to his cheeks. He was not remotely delicate, but had he stood suddenly, he would surely have fainted. He was taken with a strong urge to laugh out loud, but instead managed to say, ‘I’m afraid of nothing,’ which was so untrue – he had always been a coward and was demonstrably not of the heroic type – that he then did laugh, as at some uproarious witticism, at which Mr Browning watched him with a kind expression, like someone waiting for another to finish choking.

  Then he briefly cupped a hand on Harry’s knee and said, in what felt like a shout but was probably no more than a murmur, ‘My name is Hector, and when you undress tonight, you’ll find my card is in your trouser pocket,’ adding, by way of explanation, ‘My father was a prestidigitator.’

  Harry had never been given to nightmares, or even to remembering his dreams much, although for a year after his mother’s death he had often cried himself to sleep, as much from a new fear that he would die in his slumber as from the unremitting sorrow at her loss. Around the confusing onset of puberty, when the dire but unspecific warnings of the Harrow chaplain and the filthy jokes and teasing of the older boys began to make a kind of sense, he had one dream so repeatedly and memorably that it came to resemble a recollection rather than a product of his sleeping imagination.

  He was in a group in a classroom or gymnasium under the instruction of some teacher or other when a smartly uniformed man strode in unannounced with a letter. Evidently deferring to some far greater authority, the teacher hastily opened the letter and read it, and then he and the visitor searched through the class. The other boys stepped aside, as if knowing they weren’t the ones sought, but Harry just stood there, waiting, knowing, once he had experienced the dream already, how it would end. As the man in uniform grew nearer, he became aware that he was extravagantly handsome, like a prince from a legend or the young Lord Kitchener, yet also dangerous, a man who could have one killed with a flick of his gloved hand. The other boys parted like a treacherous sea, leaving him exposed, yet the sea wasn’t precisely treacherous, since he wanted to be found.

  The moment that invariably woke him, when the teacher pointed him out and the uniformed man’s eyes finally met his own, was as thrilling as it was heart-stopping.

  Chapter Eight

  The next day was given over to a flutter of packing and preparation. Harry and Winnie and Phyllis and the nursery maid were travelling to Chester for the christening of Jack and George’s firstborn.

  Jack, as ever, acted upon Harry as north upon a compass. His seemingly uncomplicated happiness, his delight in George, in fatherhood, in having little Phyllis ride on his back while he played pony, were a kind-eyed corrective and made Harry sharply aware how close to the brink he had strayed. And yet, throughout the visit, its busy pleasures, the inspections of improvements to the house and practice, the christening and lunch party after it, a walk around the old city walls, a day at the races and even a morning’s excellent riding from a stud near Tattenhall where Jack had the care of a mare and new foal, a voice was speaking to him that said nothing of family or wholesomeness.

  On the long train ride home he sought to silence it by taking an interest in Winnie, but sh
e was preoccupied on her own account, sad at parting from George, who was such a favourite of hers, and she soon let the conversation die so that she could read her novel or stare wanly out of their compartment window.

  ‘We could always move, you know,’ he told her. ‘Find a house in Chester. Jack assures me the cost of living is far lower there. Then you could see George every week instead of twice a year.’

  ‘It’s a nice idea,’ she told him wearily, ‘but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. I fear she has rather come to depend on us. The boys are either severe to her or mocking and the girls give her nothing but worry.’ When he made no rejoinder, she briefly laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘But it’s a kind thought. Thank you,’ then returned to The Queen’s Necklace and left him failing to read Kipling, a prey to thoughts he would much rather not entertain.

  On their first day back in town, he found he was persistently shivery, perhaps through having got so wet on the ride with Jack, so headed to Jermyn Street after lunch, thinking a Turkish bath would warm his bones a little. He found he had passed the entrance to the baths, however, and made for another doorway entirely, which stood between two shopfronts. He had burnt Mr Browning’s card in the grate when he found it in his trouser pocket the morning after the trip to the Gaiety, but apparently the handwritten address on its back had scorched itself on his consciousness first.

  It was a flat, he imagined. There were many such small roosts for bachelors. Thrice in ten minutes he saw women enter or leave by a door that wasn’t a shop’s. He had several times heard it said that no lady would ever be seen in the neighbourhood. He saw well-dressed women buying cheese in Paxton and Whitfield, and soap and such in Floris, but perhaps they did so with a grim, breath-holding air before slipping back up to the relative respectability of Piccadilly.